Kawaii! – Manami Okazaki & Geoff Johnson

As fully paid up members of the ‘We love Japan’ club, primarily due to their anorak style attention to detail on, well… anoraks but that’s not just where the story ends. We also love the land of the rising sun’s unique brand of ‘what the fuckness‘ that can be neatly and effiently summed up best by the word ‘Kawaii’. Loosely translating as ‘cute’ this enigmatic and all encompassing word can be used to describe most facets of Japanese pop culture from smiley faced Bento boxes and kittens dressed as samurais to kinky waitresses and Hello Kitty stickers stuck to the sides of jumbo jets. There are two ways you can uncover this mystical Eastern phenomena, you can spend a couple of grand on a holiday over there and try to buy some pyschotic teddy-bear toys and make friends with some Harajuku kids or there’s the cheaper, more concise, easier option of buying Manami Okazaki & Geoff Johnson’s aptly named Kawaii! book, which gives an extensive rundown on everything that fits under the pink, bunny-eared Kawaii umbrella, in fact it’s less of a book and more of a paper museum. A very Kawaii paper museum.